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Isaac Dressen

@isaac-dressen

Person who exists, white, tme, cis.

if you are unable to donate financially to help palestine, you can donate your time by protesting, boycotting, and putting up posters!

if all you have is your device and internet access, you can put your clicks to good use on arab.org. they use the advertising revenue generated by your clicks to help good causes.

and i would urge those able to spare a few dollars to donate to one or more of the following organizations:

it’s frustrating when you’re talking about an inherently oppressive institution that dehumanizes everyone who is subjected to it and someone is like “it’s especially bad for those it is incorrectly applied to!” as though being the intended victim of an injustice makes it less of a tragedy

I'm really gonna need people who claim to care about gender inclusion on sports to stop saying "trans people" or "trans kids" when they mean trans women and girls.

Just for example before anyone gets annoying about this:

These are direct from the WKF (world karate federation) "Transgender Rules" document.

Here are there requirements for trans men to compete in men's divisions:

Obviously annoying but basically they're asking for a doctor's note that says go for it and that's it.

In contrast, these are the rules for trans women:

(yes it spans 2 pages) They are demanding that any trans woman who ever wants to compete at any level have transitioned hormonally before the age of TWELVE. They're looking for invasive information about someone's puberty stages (which if any girl was able to transition that young, what are the odds she can prove it??). They require regular testosterone testing and require you to be at a level under that of some cis women FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. This policy clearly is designed to make sure that trans women will never be able to compete in women's divisions; these standards are simply unrealistic and absurd. And I didn't even include all the rhetorical justifications earlier in the document about all the biological advantages "males" supposedly have.

By the way, this doesn't only apply to the sparring competition (which is "skin contact" not full contact fighting), but also to the kata (forms) competition which is entirely non-contact and truly has no need to be gender divided in the first place. And this isn't even a professional league—it's all amateur except for an handful of people with sponsorships. It's not even an Olympic sport except for once in 2021.

If you truly cannot see a disparity here or you feel like justifying this in any possible way then you are not an ally to trans women and you don't actually believe in gender inclusive sports. This is what structural transmisogyny looks like, and this is why we need to be fighting specifically for trans women and girls and not just "trans people" generally.

can we please acknowledge that tma/tme is a meaningful distinction? a justice of the US supreme court is openly saying that it's legal to discriminate against trans women because the same laws do not target trans men. the transmisogyny is what makes it permissible. your transphobia is fine as long as it has carveouts for men.

Fascinating parallel here. This incapacity of the legal framework to protect groups who are at the intersection of two protected groups (trans women in this case, black women in the original) even while protecting both groups individually is Crenshaw's original reason for coining the word "intersectionality", which has since gone through the wringer.

You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.

There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.

It's more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that "losing your humanity" does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works

tragic when a thing gets hate for being 'woke trash' and you look into it and its not even that woke. like cmon man i was promised monacle popping gay commie propaganda. this is just a video game with a woman in it.

I love when paranormal investigators appeal to their long experience for credibility. I've been playing pretend for seventeen years, and let me tell you in that time I've imagined some shit you wouldn't believe.

can we please acknowledge that tma/tme is a meaningful distinction? a justice of the US supreme court is openly saying that it's legal to discriminate against trans women because the same laws do not target trans men. the transmisogyny is what makes it permissible. your transphobia is fine as long as it has carveouts for men.

i am starting to get seriously annoyed at the generalization of yaoi and yuri to mean gay fiction stuff and lesbian fiction stuff in general. you people don't even care about manga. you people don't even know what the most prominent bl and yuri works are outside of a half-formed stereotype of those genres in your mind. stop it!!!!!!

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Placing Nazism on the same level as Russian communism is also a way of diminishing the predominantly Soviet contribution to Hitler’s defeat. It is particularly unjust and unbearable to the Russians, who all lost relatives in the “Great Patriotic War.” They see in it, quite rightly, an attempt to negate their sacrifice and to despoil them of recognition of their victory. Once the war was over, the West hurriedly forgot the Soviets’ major contribution. “It was thanks to our deliveries of weapons and food!” we are wont to stress, that led to the victory over Nazi oppression.
This segregation of memory became increasingly obvious as 1945 receded and the memory of war sufferings faded. We still remember Stalingrad but we have forgotten the decisive tank battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. And we forget that, if the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 succeeded, it was thanks to the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Zhukov’s soldiers engaged in an offensive on the Eastern Front (Operation Bagration) to pin down the German troops and prevent the Wehrmacht from transferring its tanks to France.
In 1944, each Ryan soldier who landed in Normandy knew what he owed to the sacrifice of Comrade Ivan in Byelorussia. The Allied press of the time, which celebrated Zhukov and Stalin on its covers, was not mistaken. The two of them made the covers of Time Magazine several times in 1944 and 1945. But with the passing of time and the launching of the Cold War, those memories gradually faded to be replaced by the grandiloquent celebrations of the landing in Normandy. Hollywood and all the resources of cinema have since contributed to celebrating the Landing as the major operation during the war, when the Russians had already done most of the fighting in the East. [...]
Minimizing the victory of the USSR thus contributes to putting in place memory obliteration with the aim of excluding Russia from the western sphere and discrediting her by reducing the West-USSR opposition to a democracy vs. communism clash whereas, in actual fact, the USSR and communism, through their huge contribution to victory, saved European democracies from Nazi servitude.

Creating Russophobia by Guy Mettan (2017).

zero patience for "irreversible damage" rhetoric because like... parents are allowed to do all kinds of other irreversible body modification to their kids and nobody gives a fuck. you can pierce your kid's ears, you can sign them up for a sport that will injure them for life, you can provide or withhold medical care like vaccines according to whatever whims you like. i've mentioned this before but my mom forced me to get laser hair removal done on my legs when i was a teenager because my body wasn't mine, the way i chose to upkeep it was a reflection on her. "irreversible damage" is very much part and parcel of the broader belief that parents own their children's bodies.

you tell me that all the bad people are stupid. you tell me that stupid people should be killed, bred out, that evolution will leave them behind. i tell you that's not funny, that i have an intellectual disability, that i want to be allowed to love and to have children of my own. that maybe it's not the end of the world if "stupid" people get to stay. that my caregiver loves me and takes care of me. that she reads to me. that i get by with my little accessibility tools scattered about the house, my aac, and by being gentle. you tell me it's a joke. clearly you aren't like those REAL eugenicists, you only talk like them. you tell me surely i must agree- all the bad people, the ones who take away my rights, they must not be smart, they must be lacking some information to make them like this. i tell you smart people have hurt me more than anyone else because they know better and they still choose cruelty. these people in power aren't lacking anything. they have all the resources in the world and brains that work the way they want. they don't know struggle, they doom everyone who does. you don't stop talking about "stupid people" like we're a disease to eradicate. i note you down as one more smart person who has failed me by choosing to be cruel when you knew better

I didn't add that to my tropical enviroments in fiction post, but some people talked about Tatooine in Star Wars as an example of a tropical or at least not-temperate home to heroes like Luke and Anakin, and the thing about Tatooine is that it's not a home. Luke hates it and wants to escape from it. Anakin was raised as a slave there, his infamous meme line is "I hate sand". Same with Rey and Jakku (the running gag is that nobody wants to go to Jakku). Every time characters go to Tatooine, it's portrayed as an exotic planet full of adventure and danger. Not a home.

Which is *interesting* because the home of Luke (and Anakin) is an actual home in one of the traditional Berber styles in Matmata, Tunisia, where it was filmed. The name Tatooine comes from Tataouine in Tunisia. Those exotic places that you see in the movies are or were homes to people and they have been for centuries. People who consider the desert home, like others would consider forests, jungles, plains, or oceans home. But, like I said, tropical and desert enviroments are instead always the Exotic, the Place of Adventure. Never home.

Wouldn't it have been interesting if Luke missed the heat of Tatooine (I know I have missed it when I went to colder places). If he missed the clear desert sky, the twin suns, the customs of his home, feeling a bit alienated in a perfectly clean spaceship instead of a warm lived-in place? Just something to think.

Hundreds of people detained at the Alligator Alcatraz immigration processing center west of Miami, Florida, appear to have vanished. They have disappeared from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online database, and their lawyers and families have been unable to locate them, according to immigrant advocacy groups.
“When searching for people detained there, the ICE locator now says, ‘Call the Florida Department of Corrections for details,’” says Luis Sorto of Sanctuary of the South, a network that offers legal services and participated in a lawsuit against the government over restrictions on access to lawyers for detainees at the infamous immigration jail.
All of the plaintiffs who were being held at the center were transferred to another location after a new lawsuit was filed in August challenging Florida’s authority to detain people there, Sorto added. That lawsuit also noted that the detainees did not appear in ICE’s tracking system.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the lawsuit, described Alligator Alcatraz as a “black hole,” noting that some people were “missing,” effectively “off the radar” of the immigration system, and “their lawyers and families often don’t know where they are or how to contact them.”

Too many people still act like, “Oh, it’s the New York Post, of course they’d lie about other countries or people of color,” then turn around and assume Reuters or BBC etc will somehow never do this.

What people should be asking instead is: What are they actually trying to convey here? Why are they saying it in this specific way? Who benefits from this story being told like this? Who is this person telling me this piece? Which government benefits the most from this? Which share raise or drop when this story broke?

You just have to approach every news agency as mouthpieces of the US world order and start from there. There's no other way around it.

This has nothing to do with English classes lol like war mongering propaganda comes in other languages too. This is about developing enough distrust toward Euro-American journalism to call out the bullshits and it's something that cannot be nurtured without learning about US imperialism and their use of media to propagandise for regime change.

There are lots of literate and well read people around the world doing CIA jobs for free.

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